Since May 2006, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has been enforcing a landmark ruling that sets explicit regulations on the collection, storage and reporting of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data for internet applicants. It also defines internet applicants, identifies electronic data collection methods, creates basic qualification standards and establishes recordkeeping requirements for compliance.
While OFCCP regulations are specifically for companies with federal contracts, it is the responsibility of every employer to eliminate discrimination in their hiring process. It is not enough to just consult an attorney (which clearly should be step 1). In today’s world, where applicants can easily apply to hundreds of openings with a few mouse clicks and each job attracts hundreds of candidates, using a spreadsheet to track all of this information is possible (maybe) but ensuring its accuracy or drawing any insight out of this information is impossible. Regardless, manually tracking this information has gotten increasingly more cumbersome and maintaining the integrity of this data has been riddled with human error (transcribing information from one form to another) as the volume of recruiting data continues to increase.
To help ensure that your company remains compliant with these types of government regulations, your organization should be storing, tracking, and analyzing hiring information with a solution that can handle large amounts of data while minimizing the need to copy information from one form to another. As such, this solution must have these 4 critical capabilities: ask every potential employee to identify their EEO info, capture the reasons why your employees have chosen NOT to hire someone (every time), continuously analyze this information in real-time and be able to create reports that you can use for compliance reporting.
But there is good news. Tracking the information that can help your company stay in compliance, perhaps even reduce hiring discrimination, has really never been easier….as long as you choose the right recruiting software vendor. Be careful, shop around and ask the right questions because not every vendor understands these regulations (and most have incomplete applications that will cause you to have gaps in your program).
What questions do you ask of your ATS vendor?
So, what should you be looking for? Here is a list of things that you need to consider. My first piece of advice is when choosing applicant tracking software make sure you not only ask the right questions; also take the time to see the feature in action, live, so you really know how everything works. This is important stuff; don’t just take the salesperson’s word for it.
Request EEO information for every job from your careers page. Just about any applicant tracking system will include a feature that requests voluntary EEO information from applicants during the online application process. If it doesn’t, don’t buy it. A good looking, fully-branded careers site, that displays your EEO disclaimer and asks for voluntary EEO/AA information should be easy to set up and simple to manage without support from IT.
Automatically capture “reasons for non-selection” for every applicant. Here’s where the rubber really meets the road. OFCCP regulations require employers to capture a reason for non-selection for every candidate they receive. When evaluating recruiting software, you MUST determine how it will capture reasons for non-selection. This information is critical and most legacy applicant tracking systems have no way of capturing this data. Those that do, often require you and your team to take time consuming extra steps and force you to enter loads of data manually. Choose a system that enables everyone in your company to easily, accurately and automatically capture pre-selected reasons for non-selection without creating extra steps in your recruiting process.
Ask minimum qualification question for every job. Asking minimum qualifications is best accomplished during the online application process. When applicants do not meet a job’s minimum qualifications the government does not require you to track them as an applicant. Choose recruiting software that allows you to automate this process, and you’ll save time by ensuring that you are processing only the applicants that are qualified for your jobs. A smart recruiting system will store each applicant’s minimum qualification answers with their record and will allow you to remove candidates of this type from your applicant flow logs automatically.
Create applicant flow logs automatically for any job. Every federal contractor must generate applicant flow logs that record all the information required by the OFCCP regulations for conducting an adverse impact analysis. If an applicant tracking system is already tracking all the relevant information that comprises a flow log (data received, name, position, job group, race and sex, veterans status, reason for non-selection, date of hire), generating a report should be simple. Ideally choose recruiting technology that’ll allow you to export applicant flow logs into the same form that you’ll send to the OFCCP.
Create Hire/Offer Logs instantly. The purpose of this report is to record each hire or job offer made by your company during the reporting period being analyzed as part of your affirmative action plan. Again, you’ll want to select software that automatically tracks all the required information to fulfill the OFCCP’s requirements (date of hire, date of offer, job title, job group, gender, ethnicity, race, veterans’ status). Creating a report should take one or two clicks, and should allow you to export the report to Excel.
Audit your EEO statistics anytime from an online dashboard. Now, it’s up to you to monitor and regularly audit your EEO/AA data. Proactive assessment and management can prevent costly litigation. Purchasing software that allows to view EEO data online and to generate custom reports is essential and is a good way to take preventative steps against risks. Make sure that you have access to all of your EEO/AA data, so you can ensure that your company is indeed an equal opportunity employer.
Finally, you’d probably expect that recruiting software that will capture, track and report EEO/OFCCP data automatically would be expensive and difficult to implement. But, thanks to new delivery methods and even newer business models, there’s technology available that you can set up in a matter of days and will only cost a few hundred dollars per month. Compared to the cost of a discrimination lawsuit, this is a no-brainer. So, get educated, know what you need to track, kick some tires, do the demos and choose modern recruiting software that can turn your OFCCP headache into nothing more than just another thing you’ve got under control.
"We were not able to identify your contact e-mail address. Your login e-mail address will be used as your contact e-mail address instead. Please be aware that this contact e-mail address will be used to contact you."
The message above was sent to a prospective candidate from an applicant tracking system -not ours. This system is managing a fortune 500 company’s careers site. Yikes! It can hardly be debated that enterprise software is way too complicated and for the most part, pretty thoughtless when it comes to user experience. The message above is a perfect example. The expensive applications that businesses use to run their human resources are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code. If you work at a company that uses buinsess software or you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like apply to a job — or, heck, even look at a job on a corporate careers site — then you’ve probably encountered some really annoying user experiences.
How did we get here? Part of the problem may be that the people using enterprise software just don’t demand anything better. They think all business software has to be complicated - it’s all they’ve ever known. People have just been dealing with poorly-designed technology for so long that they internalize the flaws. Maybe it’s that a lot of these systems, applicant tracking software particularly, are built for “power” users so thoughtful, consumer-like, usability concerns are sacrificed for massive amounts of options that ultimately “sell” the technology. In the end, buyers do compare features and typically the software with the most features wins. But, the question that constantly nags us is - Does the user win? We think not.
Clearly, the real topic here, the usability of enterprise software, is a huge can of worms and I’m only scratching the surface of an increasingly incendiary topic. I can tell you this though; the “error” message above actually encourages us. It’s evident that a majority of our peers that develop recruiting software ignore design / usability. We don’t. It’s also clear that buyers of software are increasingly eager to find well designed software that improves usability and ultimately makes their lives easier. We like this trend, it plays to our strengths.
Finally, we want to make a public promise. We will NEVER send another human a message that doesn’t make any sense. It’s the least we can do.
We get a lot of requests from people that want us to send them more information about Newton, our applicant tracking software. We’re not complaining! This is a good sign. The word is getting out. While we realize that fact sheets and feature matrices are ok for comparison’s sake, we believe videos are better at conveying how technology really works. So, we started to put together a series of videos that we can forward to people.
Recently, I received a request from an industry analyst to outline our history. Unknowingly, she made a joke about how it shouldn’t take too long to put something together because we just started the company in January 2009. Little did she know. But, how would she know? No one here has really sat down and tried to chronicle the genesis of Newton. Frankly, we have been a little busy. There is, in fact, quite a bit of history though – almost 5 years. So, over the past week or so, I have been bugging our product managers, Steve and John, for their best recollections and even found some old screen shots. I tried to turn nearly 5 years of history into less than 2 pages of text – a long blog post. So, here it goes.
Newton is the brainchild of former recruitment outsourcers (that’s us) that began developing the product in 2004 after becoming frustrated with existing commercial recruiting technology. Having run corporate recruiting programs for nearly 10 years prior with paper resumes, email, spreadsheets and legacy software, we wanted to leverage the benefits of internet technology to help us provide a better service to our clients: we wanted something that would make rolling out, ramping up, managing, and improving hiring programs easier for us; we wanted something that offered a more collaborative recruiting experience for all users; and we needed something that was simple and easy-to-use for all users. After demoing a lot of recruiting products and even trying some, they all fell short in at least one area or another and ultimately didn’t meet our needs. We realized that they would have to build this system if we were truly serious about providing better recruiting services.
So, we designed Newton to address two areas where we thought the existing recruiting technology in the marketplace fell short. One, it needed to help people make hires so easily that our client users would actually want to use our recruiting system. We wanted to give our customers a login, conduct a short walk-through and have the user start contributing to the process immediately – no hassles.
Secondly, like many other recruiting systems, Newton also needed robust reporting capabilities, but we wanted it to be able to surface and report information in real time, so we could help companies continuously improve hiring programs on the fly. We knew if we solved the first major problem of most recruiting systems, user adoption, we could build a real-time reporting platform at some point that would actually have useful data in it (since most users preferred Newton over traditional resources, like email). Over the years, we focused on refining Newton’s usability and workflow to address ease of use eventually deploying it to users in mid-2005.
By early 2006, Newton was the recruiting platform for one of the country’s largest recruiting programs with hundreds of concurrent jobs, thousands of users and tens of thousands of active applicants. Newton had quickly become mission critical to dozens of companies, which gave our product team the unique advantage of being able to test and tune our application in complex, high-volume, and demanding commercial environments. With the addition of a full-time development team and a couple of product managers, Newton evolved even faster and became even more popular.
In 2007, still coupled with services offered by our parent company’s recruitment outsourcing division, we moved Newton to the Adobe Flex platform – making Newton the first rich internet application for recruiting. This move accelerated development cycles and improved performance and usability. By the end of the year, Newton was deployed to users at some of the largest technology companies in the world, like Dell and Microsoft, often supplementing legacy applicant tracking systems.
Formal inquiries to buy Newton as a standalone product started to increase in by early 2008. Many companies began to feel the pinch of the retracting economy and were seeking ways to bring recruiting in-house. As the year wore on, more and more companies were asking to use Newton to run their recruiting programs. With the writing on the wall, Newton’s parent company, prepared to launch Newton Software, despite the already crowded applicant tracking marketplace, creating a separate company to manage the day-today business operations and to take the product to new markets.
Newton Software was officially launched on January 5th 2009. As the first product offered by this newly formed, autonomous company, Newton, our first product, had the advantage of having been tested, and refined in real-world recruiting situations since late 2004. Unlike most start-ups, we had a mature product to start with, something customers could buy, and a product that was proven. We will be the first to admit that starting a company that offers hiring software during a recession was at first daunting. But, Newton was greeted kindly by industry analysts and customers alike because of its innovative, process driven, easy-to-use approach to an old problem. And we have been steadily growing our customer base since our inception.
This is nowhere close to the end.
Check out our background page to see more screenshots of the evolution of Newton.
